Aidan Higgins's great novel has long been unavailable, and is here reissued in a new and revised edition. "Balcony of Europe" tells the story of a young Jewish wife from San Francisco and a middle-aged Irish painter who meet in a village on the coast of Spain, beginning an affair during the coldest European winter in two hundred years--all the while surrounded by a cast of characters as bizarre and hilarious as they are, finally, touching. Lyrical and humorous, heartbreaking and hopeful, "Balcony of Europe "is Aidan Higgins's crowning achievement.